Reviewed by: Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire by Alan Gallay Cecelia Moore Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire. By Alan Gallay (New York: Basic Books, 2019. Pp. xiv, 560. $40.00, ISBN 978-1-5416-4579-0.) Alan Gallay's new book, Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire, challenges the myths and representations of Sir Walter Raleigh to offer a fresh analysis of the iconic Elizabethan courtier. Ralegh (his own preferred spelling) has been the subject of numerous biographies and historical works and is familiar to many from popular depictions in novels, movies, plays, and more. Gallay has returned to the primary sources to explore the cultural influences that informed Ralegh's role in colonization and conquest in Ireland and the Americas. The author's aim is to present "an origin story of empire far different from what we have imagined," and thus to provide "new context for understanding its legacies" (p. 5). Gallay has used his broad knowledge of primary sources and scholarly works in this biography, which also draws from his studies of the Indian slave trade. Walter Ralegh has an interwoven narrative that revisits the same period as it moves between locales and documents to connect the various aspects of Ralegh's career. Gallay relies on the reader to have some knowledge of the story; however, a timeline would have been helpful for quick reference. The United States has memorialized Ralegh as a founder from the beginning of the nation, nowhere more so than in North Carolina. Revolutionary-era state leaders named their new capital city for him. Nineteenth-century elites embraced the account of his so-called lost colony on Roanoke as an origin story of a white, English, Christian nation. In this mythology Ralegh became the representative for an imagined heritage of Anglo-white supremacy that served to justify the continued oppression of African Americans. In Walter Ralegh, Gallay argues that this depiction has covered over the cultural forces that shaped Ralegh's worldview and erased his elemental role in the development of England's sixteenth-century plans for empire. Colonization was just one strategy the English Crown used to challenge Spain's dominance of the Atlantic world. The English also used piracy and outright war. Ralegh was involved in all of it from 1578, when he joined his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert in a naval expedition, to his execution in 1618. The narrative connects Ralegh's court activities, military exploits, and colonization efforts in the Americas and Ireland. Ralegh was the architect who crafted the moral and legal justifications for English conquest. Gallay argues that Ralegh's view of empire did not have the racial features that came later. Instead, Ralegh believed that England would be improved by exposure to other cultures, that "empire would be an act of co-creation," where each partner benefited the other (p. 12). Gallay shows how Hermeticism, a movement that linked knowledge of the physical world to a greater understanding of the mystical realm, informed this theory. Ralegh sought to chronicle the languages and society of the Native peoples of the Americas because this work added to a [End Page 321] greater knowledge of the world. His vision was an English empire that included both Indians and English. The beauty of Ralegh's own writing and his utopian vision can mask the brutality of England's actions. Even as Gallay strips away the fictions about Ralegh's life for a fresh examination of his ideas, the author reminds readers that much of what Ralegh and his compatriots wrote was itself public relations to advance their cause. They positioned themselves for European audiences as the antithesis of the Spanish, and they wooed Native peoples as allies when their forces were not powerful enough to subdue opposition. By the time of Ralegh's death in 1618, English ships had looted more than a thousand Spanish ships and ports, launched unprovoked attacks on Indigenous societies, traded in enslaved Africans and Native Americans, and brutally put down multiple uprisings in Ireland. Ralegh might have argued that English colonization could be a humane force, as Gallay notes, yet the trajectory of English conquest remained exploitative and murderous. Less than a year after Ralegh's death...